


A Cross of Swords

by Morbane



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
Genre: Action/Adventure, Age of Winter (Narnia), Constructive Criticism Welcome, Crossover, Enemies, Gen, Heist, Loyalty, Snow, Swordfighting, Worldbuilding, forced to work together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 13:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: In which Sir Percy Blakeney takes the second adventure that Aslan sends him.And Chauvelin takes both a leap and a fall.





	A Cross of Swords

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/gifts).



**Part One: Blossoms of Snow**

It was a clear morning in late Prairial, or as we would say now, the middle of June. The languor of summer was tempered by a wind that sometimes blew the scent of the marsh from the north, and sometimes the scent of the woods from the east; and the blossoming lilac in the yard of the old farm-house danced a little as its partners changed.

The scene inside the house was also calm to the eye. A small, neat man, dark-haired but with silver at his temples and lines above his brows, sat watching a second man; tall, ruffianish in dress and with streaks of dirt everywhere from his boots to his face. The first man sat tensely, one foot braced behind the other as if at any moment he might have to spring up; the second leaned back in his chair, looking almost ready to nap through the gentle morning. The first man held a pistol. The second man's legs were bound securely from his ankles to above his knee. It was only a beginning of the study of contrasts that might be made between them.

Chauvelin - for it was he - did not speak. He would very much like to have answers from his prisoner, and confession on all manner of topics, but what might be said in private was useless compared to what could be extracted before official witnesses or committed to print. Though some of Blakeney's band even now guided a group of traitors to the republic out of Justice's blind grasp, the most valuable prey was here. This scene was a waiting game. Shortly - or so his plan had been laid - the Scarlet Pimpernel's lieutenant would arrive at the farmhouse, seeking his leader, and four men who had been detailed to Chauvelin would arrest them both. The leader and second thus secured, the two would be hurried to Paris to trial - each hostage on the other, one of the few ploys that had worked reliably on this League of devils. One man's name would be damned for ever, and another's cleared: his own.

His enemy's apparent unconcern did not needle Chauvelin: as all must who risked, and risked, and risked again, Blakeney had lost.

A jingle caught Chauvelin's attention. Taking up the pistol, one eye always on Blakeney - whose own eyes were quite closed - he went to the door, which was half open, arranged so that the first view on approach was of Blakeney, seated - apparently - of his own will at the table. No; there was no horse in the lane - it was only the window-catch that had caught his ear. He resumed his seat.

A quarter-hour passed that might have been called pleasant. The house was empty; its owners had taken time to pack their belongings before they fled. It was time they had ill afforded. One month later, the errant Citizen and Citizeness had ascended the steps of Madame Guillotine. As far as Chauvelin knew, the only persons who had stayed in the house since its occupants' departure had been the soldiers who had pursued the fleeing couple - and members of the Scarlet Pimpernel's band, to whom the former occupants had been friends and allies.

Fitting, then, their end.

The house, therefore, was neat and tidy and very still, and no animals lowed or bayed in the fields or yards attached to it. Chauvelin could hear the wind as it teased at the window; he could hear a bird rustling in the lilac, and another bird, perhaps its mate, scratching at the edge of the roof. He had seen a nest under the eaves outside. He could hear his enemy breathe, and consider at leisure the finity of those breaths.

The initial feeling of satisfaction had passed, and in its place was a strange inevitability. Pride was not Chauvelin's besetting sin, and in this quiet moment, he could acknowledge to himself that the capture of his enemy was a feather in Fortune's cap, not his. He had already drawn up orders to handsomely reward the passing labourer who had made it known that the Bergers' farmhouse had seen visitors, perhaps looters hoping to recover what the State had overlooked; he had written other commendations, dispersing them liberally, to those who had passed the information on and so to him.

In Paris, he would make the most of his hour of triumph. But while he waited, he was balanced between quieter emotions: relief that things lay at this pass, but also a wry disgust that it was not cleverness that had delivered him his captive; a tired cynicism that drove him to consider his position in the State after the glory of this English devil's capture had died down; and the wariness that all who had survived to this year 1794 slept and woke with, lest some enemy within the ranks of those who served la belle France might seize his triumph and make of it their own - leaving him only defeat.

He was vigilant; his thoughts were not lulling ones; the smiling summer morning had not yet quite closed its lips over the teeth of spring; and so what happened next could not be attributed to any kind of doze or dream.

First, the wind caught the window open entirely, with a gust that from its chill blew straight from the North, and it brought in with it a pinch of pale lilac blooms, which fell on Blakeney. Blinking slowly, Chauvelin's prisoner sat up. With a courteous nod to Chauvelin, he put his left hand up to his chest to brush off a blossom. The right he kept loose and relaxed on the table top.

His eyes narrowed; his gaze seemed inward. A blossom had fallen on his left shoulder also. He lifted his right hand and caught it up. With every appearance of whimsy he held it in his palm and gazed at it. Chauvelin could not understand why such a thing had caught his attention, unless it were the prisoner's reflection that his future offered few blossoms and fewer clean, sweet breezes. Wondering if the gesture were meant as a distraction, he swept his eyes around the room, his grip tightening on the pistol.

When he looked back, the blossom was in the process of dissolving into a drop of water on Blakeney's palm.

A curious smile lifted the corners of Blakeney's mouth. The prisoner turned towards the window; looking there himself, Chauvelin started. The lilac was gone. The yard was gone. There was nothing but a swirling whiteness out that window, and though there had been only one gust of wind, the cold had deepened ever since it blew.

Unexpectedly, Blakeney spoke. "Most discourteous to miss our engagement," he said gravely, "but it seems I am called away."

"What nonsense is this?" Chauvelin hissed.

"It's rather a bore to explain," Blakeney drawled, every bit the dandy in his manner, in an absurd contrast with the costume in which he had been apprehended. He stood.

"Sit down," Chauvelin commanded him. To his great relief, Blakeney did, with a shrug, shifting fractiously in his chair.

It was the only reassurance. The room was now so cold that he shivered, and a wave of dizziness passed across him - and in that dizziness it seemed to him that the window was expanding. Perhaps he was feverish. His eyes could not be trusted - another gust blew through the window, and on the table and the floor, it deposited snow.

Chauvelin backed to the door, never taking his eyes off Blakeney, and pulled it roughly open behind him. He risked a glance back through it, poised to call out to one of his subordinates waiting in their hidden places.

There was no snow behind him - only the still, warm, muddy June morning, and a bird was singing.

In the moment that he was struck with confusion, his prisoner got up again, grabbed at his bag that had lain on the floor a short distance from him, reached for the window, and with a great heave of his arms, flung himself through it, bound legs and all.

Chauvelin fired. Even if he were fevered, he did not imagine he could miss - not at such a range. And yet, just as the window had widened, so had he the sense that the figure struggling through the snow beyond was now further than the road - further than the empty fields beyond this farmhouse. He did the only thing he could: he ran to the window, stepped up on Blakeney's abandoned chair, and jumped through after his enemy.

He landed in snow: a shock of cold, and a thump that told him it barely covered rock. He floundered, cold soaking through his thin boots and thin coat.

In this place, whatever it was, Blakeney was suddenly close again, no further than the length of the room they had just shared. He had managed to get upright, and stood watching Chauvelin.

"If you want to go back," he called to Chauvelin, "you can, if you do it now."

Against good sense, Chauvelin turned. Behind him he beheld the bizarrity of a window hanging in mid-air, and sunlight falling through it that did not fall here. Through it he could see the farm-house kitchen, one chair thrown askew, the other pulled up below the window.

Gasping, stunned at least as much by the cold as by the assault on his reason, he did not move.

Another gust of wind blew past him, and in the place they had just left, it caught the window again and blew it shut.

The window vanished, and all was left was a hillside thick with snow, and the snowy sky, and a mountain peak ahead, and Blakeney, and Chauvelin.

* * *

Chauvelin approached warily. To his dazed mind - was he awake? asleep? hypnotized? ill? - it was at least clear that he had surrendered the upper hand. He could think of nothing, for a moment, but to adopt his enemy's casual attitude.

"You have the advantage of me," he said.

"True enough," Blakeney said, cheerfully, occupied with untying his legs. "I suggest we consider ourselves enemies of each other's enemy, for the time being — I speak of the weather, of course."

Chauvelin raised an eyebrow. 

"Where are we?" he asked. "For it seems to me that you know."

"I may have been here before," Blakeney admitted. "For the life of me, though, I could not swear to it. We need bearings… Oh, don't look at me like that," he ejaculated, with a kind of fond exasperation whose falseness grated on his companion. "I won't leave you to freeze."

He got the last of the rope free, bundled it up economically, and put it into his rough knapsack. With a twinkling smile, he took out something else as well. It was a blanket, soiled with dried mud and coal-dust, perhaps some element of a disguise he had worn earlier in the day - Chauvelin's mind struggled to build a bridge between this scene and any other in time - perhaps some part of the plans that Chauvelin and his men had upset.

"Here," he said. "You need it, man."

Chauvelin accepted it, with hands already numbing, and pulled it around him as a rough cloak.

Blakeney turned and trudged up the hillside, and Chauvelin had no choice but to follow.

The world narrowed rapidly to Blakeney's broad back and the packed snow his footprints left. Chauvelin was acutely conscious of the cold, the growing dark, and the fact that Blakeney could easily have lengthened his much longer stride until following in his wake was impossible for Chauvelin. In fact, Chauvelin had the distinct impression that his guide was stepping shorter as Chauvelin's own steps faltered.

Blakeney looked back. "We make a good Saint Wenceslas and page, I think!" he said heartily. He waited a moment to see if Chauvelin would answer; when Chauvelin saved his breath for heaving one foot after the other, Blakeney nodded, smiling to him, and turned his face again to the wind.

Nor did Chauvelin have any answer to his predicament. If his senses were deceiving him, it seemed too complete a deceit for logic to overcome. Therefore, he must behave as if he were truly trudging through a snowy landscape. He had discarded the possibility - which had not compelled him at any rate - that he was under hypnotic suggestion: if so then Blakeney would have used this prodigious talent in any number of prior occasions, and especially when threat had existed not merely to him but also to his wife. He could not have been poisoned. If he had somehow lost consciousness while the Scarlet Pimpernel spirited him away - so that he had been conveyed in truth to mountains, awaking here - Chauvelin could not determine why it should please his enemy to struggle, lightly dressed, through deep-lain and falling snow, even to subject Chauvelin to the same agony.

His guide slowed, and turned again.

"Not long now," Blakeney said, and Chauvelin strained his ears to hear a hint of strain in the other's voice. "But steeper for a while… I have in mind that outcrop, do you see it?"

Chauvelin squinted up. The flurries of snow were lighter now, he had to admit, though the reprieve came very late. He could not feel his hands and his head and chest ached, the ache beating through them like a slow, dolorous drum, in dull and deadly counterpoint to the beat of his heart.

He thought he saw the rocks that Blakeney meant.

They climbed for a while. The rough blanket that Blakeney had given Chauvelin was broad enough that he could fist his hands in it, and when he used his hands to steady himself and grip - as he needed to do more and more often as they climbed - the snow did not quite soak through.

His clumsy grip weakened. The right edge of the blanket slipped from his hands, and he let out an involuntary cry.

Blakeney turned to him, and with a swift, smooth movement, he caught the blanket's edge up for him, wound it around his hand, and tucked the frayed ends into his loose fist, then turned to climb again.

Suddenly he stopped; had Chauvelin not already fallen a few steps behind him, he might have run into him.

"You will have to wait," he said to Chauvelin. "I think I see something ahead that is good news indeed - some other traveller." And he was gone, and Chauvelin could only marvel at his stores of energy and how fast he yet moved.

After some time, there was shouting, and he was given to understand he had fallen asleep in the snow. Next, Blakeney picked him up bodily - he felt the rope with which he had bound the Scarlet Pimpernel, now being used to help lash him to Blakeney's back - and his enemy staggered upwards against his weight.

Then warmth, and light. He was laid down, and when he could open his eyes, firelight danced in front of them. Blakeney was rubbing his feet, and then his hands, and talking, and Chauvelin could not make out what he said - he would have slept, except for the pain in his fingers, except for pain that returned everywhere. He had imagined himself lain on several thin blankets, but as sensation returned the most inward blanket revealed itself to be his own numb skin, which now complained.

Not sleep, but a kind of fugue overtook him, and he was conscious of little for some while.

He awoke in a centaur's den.

 

**Part Two: The Issue of Stars**

What Chauvelin was first aware of was this: warmth, comforting and suffusing; aches where a crease of cloth cut into him, or a knob of stone that the blankets smoothed over but partly; wood smoke and the scents of cured hay and horse; and low voices, Blakeney's and a woman's.

With no small exercise of will, he kept himself from shifting into a more comfortable position, he kept his eyes closed, and he breathed slowly, concentrating on what he could hear.

"I do not know what has brought you so far north," the woman was saying, "but you are not yet in Narnia. This is Archenland still; you are in your own home at least as much as you are in mine."

"Pardon, lady," Blakeney replied, "but I do not make Archenland my home. I hope you will permit me the curiosity of asking why you do."

"You may well ask," the woman answered. "Narnia is Aslan's country, and my own, and I long for it. But I am no Talking Beast; I do not fear that by travelling outside Narnia, and mixing with that kind that are more bestial, I too may lose my nature; and although I believe in Aslan's return, I do not feel their duty to wait for him in that land. I am a star-gazer, as my father was and his father and mother both before him, and the Witch with her eternal winter has blocked out the sky all but a handful of nights in the year. I am not so skilled nor so patient that those glimpses satisfy me. On this side of the pass, clouds still push against the mountains' edge, but magic does not hold them here. Isolation, I think, is a fair trade for the company of the stars."

"I have heard," Blakeney said, "that when Narnia fell, its doom was written in the stars. Did you see that? The comet Charnis, crossing above Tarva at apogee..."

She laughed, and Chauvelin thought he heard surprise. "You are very learned for your race, son of Adam, son neither of Narnia nor of Archenland. I have seen it in my father's charts and in my mind's eye. But not my own. You flatter me, but I am younger than I seem to you. I would be half my age again, and more, if I had seen Charnis cross the sky."

Blakeney did not respond, and after a moment, his companion continued. "Perhaps I may yet. From what I have learned of the comet's path, it curved as it crossed our stage. Though it joined and then left the dance among our stars, it may return. And if I have plotted correctly, it will again cross Tarva, at perigee this time, and this time perhaps Tarva will rise before it in the east... But my charts are not certainty; my art does not extend that far. I know not what heavenly bodies Charnis may encounter beyond our plane, and what permutations those encounters may afford. And I know not the will of He who set the stars to dancing."

"Charnis to return - when shall that happen?"

"By my guess, only - out in the plane beyond, its course is slowing, and soon it will turn. It may return sixty years from now, which is to say a full hundred years since it was first seen."

"Ah," breathed Blakeney, and Chauvelin wondered at his expression. He suspected that if he could see Blakeney's face at that moment, the eyes would not be half-lidded nor the smile faint and mocking. This, he sensed, mattered a great deal to his enemy. Of course it was all cipher; and he longed to know the key. Were _perigee_ and _apogee_ indicators of something close and far away - or merely words chosen to deceive to that affect? Was _Archenland_ a nonsensical nickname for one of France's enemies? No, Narnia and Archenland must be factions, cells of spies - not states.

"May Charnis' return advance your art," Blakeney said politely. "What of the skies lately?"

She sighed. 

"Carellan is fading," she said. "Perhaps you know it; it has other names in other lands. It is the summer star that guided King Gale of Narnia across the sea, to the Lone Islands and beyond; it is written that it shone bright above King Frank and Queen Helen on the night their first son was born. It will fall in the next decade, or after."

Blakeney said, "How fares your liege Beland, under such a star?"

Chauvelin frowned, and then, having betrayed the movement, made a slight, clumsy shift, as though he were still asleep and tossing in his dreams. He did not understand. However, it seemed that Blakeney's companion had heard nearly as much a non-sequitur as he had. "The king's life is not ruled by that star alone, son of Adam," she said, with the tone of a master correcting a disappointing student. 

"Ah! forgive me," Blakeney said. "Then may I hope he prospers."

"I see him little in the heavens," she answered. "News comes sometimes, from other travellers like yourself, or from the Eagles who still fly to visit him over the mountains. I take from your question that you have passed through Anvard briefly, or you would know he dwells there still; the young king Luthen treats him as a guest at his court, as did his father before him." 

"A pity," Blakeney said, idly, "for a King to live so long in exile. Do you think he hopes for his son to carry the crown back across the mountains?"

"He has no heir," the woman said. "But, too, he has no army. I said I speak with Eagles who have flown over Anvard. I speak also with those who have come from Beruna and beyond. If he comes across the pass, or if he sails to land on Narnia's snowy coast, the Witch will slaughter him unless Aslan himself protects him."

"He is at the court of Anvard. Would his ally not equip him?"

"I know not the minds of Men," said the unknown woman. "I know that parties have attempted the border, by land and by sea; perhaps more times than those that I know of, but all that I know of were in the first decade after Narnia fell. I know that Archenland prospers now by what the Witch's lieutenants pay it for the fruits of a land where summer still comes every year. Archenland sent food and gold and Men to Alvian before Narnia fell, and he sapped its strength to the last to try to save his realm. When Narnia fell, it fell completely, and the Witch built her strength, and Archenland was left with wounds to lick. Archenland fears to break the seal of protection that Alvian's stand laid upon the pass, lest upon its invasion of Narnia, winter should invade Archenland in return. When Narnia fell, the last king of Archenland raised a young Beland in promises; now his son rules the southern land, and Thurl is gone."

A pause. "I see," Blakeney said.

"You see: in my life, I hope for Charnis' return, but I do not hope for my own," the woman said, softly, with a sort of bitterness aimed at all directions; Chauvelin sensed a kind of barb at Blakeney and his questions, and something older and more rotten, aimed at herself.

The conversation fell into a pause.

Without their words to focus on, Chauvelin could not ignore his aches, and could not suppress the resurgent urge to twist so that the rough imperfections on the floor might bite into different parts of him. Well; and he had ceased to gain useful information some time ago, and the part-useless information he gained was enough to sift through.

"My companion stirs," Blakeney said, in a louder tone than he had used so far. "He has never been to Narnia nor spoken with any of its people - he has lived only in the world of men. I pray you are slow to take offense at his blunders."

Reflecting on this hint, Chauvelin stretched and opened his eyes.

Close above him, he saw a lantern with a tiny flame, and swimming beyond it, Blakeney's ironical face. As he began to sit up, he saw a woman's lovely face - she had great eyes and long hair loose past her shoulders, and some garment he did not recognise wrapped around those shoulders - and the further he raised himself, the further she unfolded to his eyes, and the garment ended where a horse's forelegs began, and the quilted blanket she wore did not hide the shadows of the hind legs he could see supported her also.

There are moments when, already awake, a person awakens further - it can come with the sizzle of some new idea that fires the nerves, turning an ordinary state into a charged one. Or it can come when a dulled brain is suddenly, thankfully, returned to comprehension. Chauvelin at that moment experienced both. The idea that the woman's shape was a further deception he dismissed impatiently; all at once, and deep in the core of him, he believed that he was not in France but some other place impossibly far from France, and believed that the woman was what she appeared to be, though what thing she might be, he did not know.

"Thank you for our shelter," he said.

"You are welcome to such as I have," his hostess returned gravely. "I am Springrush the Centaur."

"Chauvelin - at your service," Chauvelin managed, and with a supreme effort of will he freed himself from the blankets and stood.

* * *

For such a small effort as standing, he was well rewarded. He was offered warmer clothes, and the chance to bathe himself behind a curtain with a cloth dipped into a heated cauldron of water, and when he was done with that, food. Blakeney - already dressed in the odd local clothes, and as immaculately groomed as Chauvelin had ever seen him in his London environs - was sat further back in the cave. An earnest conversation had again sprung up between him and the Centauress, but Chauvelin had not been able to follow it. 

"I think we had best press on tomorrow," Blakeney was saying, "and seek the lower lands of Men. Is there a way sure and broad enough for unfamiliar travellers to risk it?"

Springrush's answer was equivocal, and she and Blakeney began to discuss the likely weather conditions of the coming days.

With half an ear on the conversation, Chauvelin looked around him, knowledge his present keenest requirement, now that those of his body had been sated. The cave was very tidy. The fire was built under a kind of clay chimney-funnel that clung to the wall as it rose, snaking along and out to the entrance of the cave. The walls of the cave were not vertical to the ceiling, but had many protrusions and indentations, and some of those protrusions - a little above Chauvelin's shoulder-height - had been smoothed and leveled at their tops, to make a workbench at a convenient height for a centaur's hands. Taking care not to stare too long, he observed what tools lay about the place; nothing, to him, seemed so fine and precise as belonged to modern Europe, except perhaps a small telescope (had he known, the very least of Springrush's collection) which was a thing of brilliant glass, exquisitely sensitive dials, and untarnishable alloy.

"Dwarf workmanship, I would guess," Blakeney said affably, having followed the direction of Chauvelin's gaze. 

"Yes," Springrush answered; "the best workmanship is kept in Narnia, but some is offered for trade. The cold has not closed the mines. Some among the Dwarves found early favour with the Witch - and those who prefer Aslan have found it preferable to feign commonality through work if not belief. Either way, they prosper." _Collaborators_ , Chauvelin found himself thinking, with more distaste than the lady's even tone had carried. Though perhaps it was all the same - from what he now understood of the conversation he had woken to, the people of Narnia had traded one monarch for another, and it did not surprise him that they rued the bargain.

Blakeney kept their hostess talking, concerning Centaurs she had known, and Dwarves, and Eagles, and Men she had met (very few in number) until at last she suggested - graciously, but firmly - that he would benefit from rest. So it was that Chauvelin observed how a centaur sleeps: with the horse part standing, three legs locked and one hind leg slightly poised, and with the torso bent forwards, arms loosely folded and head pillowed on a surface the height of Chauvelin's own head. (Here, Springrush had carved out a stone shelf to the level she preferred; in more ordinary environs, centaurs are known to find their support on the branches of trees, and so many a friendship between a Centaur and a Dryad has sprung up.)

Blakeney and Chauvelin made ready for sleep without further discussion, and despite the rough floor, Chauvelin slept again almost as soon as he lay down.

When he woke, it was still dark in the cave, except for the firelight, and from the logs that had burned through he could guess he had slept four hours, or perhaps five. His hostess was moving behind him in the cave; soft jingles and taps, light and discordant and not furtive, suggested some ordinary chore. "Goodnight," she said to him, a little nonsensically. After a moment, he supposed that she had napped for a few hours, horse-like, busied herself with some activity, and now returned to her rest again. But he was wide awake.

Blakeney still seemed fast asleep, as well he might be, having gone from a long trudge to a long talk without the rest Chauvelin had been afforded in between. Chauvelin got up, quiet to avoid disturbing them both, and considered the cave again.

For a moment, he had a wild thought that perhaps Blakeney's sleep would break some spell on him; that by pushing back the curtain that protected the entrance of the cave, he would reveal a world whose people and whose rules, whose blood and bloodthirstiness, he perfectly knew. But he knew better.

He turned instead to Springrush's possessions. There was a shelf of books a little beyond the fire; some star charts, which did not interest him, and others with titles such as 'The Emperor-over-the-Sea', which did. That one he took up, twin flames kindled of curiosity and scorn, an unbidden sneer twisting his mouth.

A truly curious thing happened then. As he opened the book, angling it to the firelight, the words swam in front of his eyes. He could have sworn he had read English (or, at least, as much as the tongue that he and Springrush and Blakeney had been speaking was English, but he did not think to question that then) - but the language that he knew almost as well as his own dissolved itself into a kind of gibberish. He thought that he beheld writing, but he never after could have named or even described the script, and he could not see a pattern to it. He thought perhaps if he had forced himself onwards... But he did not. He closed the book, feeling rebuked, and smarting at the thought. He replaced it on the shelf, and took to his blankets again, and slept.

In the morning he was not sure it was not a dream. His hostess was a little reserved with him, but when at last they set out, she turned to Blakeney. "Here," she said, giving him a compass, "and - here." The latter was a vial. 

"This is precious," she warned him, "and again I trust in guess, not certainty... But I think you are more than you seem, Son of Adam; either more than you tell me, or more than you know, and so I hope you may come into your own. This is an elixir of the stars' flowers - not those that they tend amongst themselves, but the flowers that spring up from their glowing footfalls when a star leaves the heavens and alights on earth. It is a dubious healer, but it sustains." And then she drew close to Blakeney and murmured something to him that Chauvelin did not hear.

The sky was hazy above them, and the first part of their journey clear to see. They had two rocky ridges to cross, and rather than cross the third, they would descend through a gorge, and then bear east. "And from then you must judge which of three routes will bring you among the trees which you will then espy," said Springrush; "for I have not travelled from my cave for some time, and know the ways only by the telling of them."

They thanked her, and set out, eyes shaded against the flitting sun.

 

**Part Three: Crossed Paths**

Blakeney travelled easily, with breath to spare from their upwards and downwards scrambles across snow and scree, but he did not seem inclined to conversation. It was Chauvelin who broke the silence, when they came over the second ridge that Springrush had described to them.

"You are fond of this place, sir," he observed, with a casual wave at the brightening sky and the distant trees that now revealed themselves beyond the mountain slopes, that Blakeney's eyes had themselves brightened to see. "When we arrived, you said that you could not swear to have been here before, but now, I think, you would be hard pressed to swear otherwise."

"Very true," Blakeney said, apparently amused at this sally. 

"Unfold it to me, if you would be so kind," Chauvelin invited drily.

Blakeney obliged. "As you may have guessed, it is found nowhere on our little globe, and what shines above us is no familiar Sol," he said. "I am not even sure this _is_ a globe... terribly queer place it is, but forgive me! I insult your wits. You have seen that for yourself too."

Chauvelin did not reply.

"Truth be told," his guide said, half-apologetically, "I'm demmed glad we met my lady Springrush, and not just for the comforts of her home - how would I explain this place to you if you had not met a Centaur, hmm? And I trust you paid attention to the talk of Dwarves..."

He caught himself up short, with a little laugh.

"You might well wonder how I can trust you enough to tell you anything of Narnia and Archenland and - other things," he said frankly, "or how you can trust me to deal fairly with you. And should we return to your land or mine - yes - _if_ , though I have at least made the journey before - you'll find me quite shut-up on the topic. But the fact of the matter is, you're here, and if certain powers did not permit you here, you would never have been able to pass through that window."

A flare of uneasy irritation rose in Chauvelin at the mention of _certain powers_ , but he did not interrupt. His thoughts were not difficult to keep private - they were picking their way slowly down a bare and gravelly slope where grass and mud were more in evidence than snow, and he caught only glimpses of Blakeney's expression.

"It is a small series of principalities," Blakeney said. "Narnia, behind us, is ruled by an usurper ... I cannot explain her to you, or to myself, but banish any thought you have of tender womanhood; she is entirely formidable in the arts of war, and for cruelty, ha! Your _tricoteuses_ scarce aspire to such ferity. Archenland, before us, is a modest and prosperous land - I knew it by its diplomats and its merchants. Further to the south and west is Calormen, sometimes an ally and sometimes a foe; it does not share the beliefs of Narnia nor Archenland, and Centaurs and Fauns and such peoples are unwelcome there. And to the east, the sea stretches further than the known lands."

"I wonder," Chauvelin said, "why you ever left a place that offers so generously to indulge you in your adventures..." He could not help imagining the unreal country through which they were scrambling as some kind of sporting-ground for the Scarlet Pimpernel, a chapter-book unfolding with a farce here, a caper there.

He expected the barb to be met with one of Blakeney's sillier laughs, but instead, his guide replied seriously, "I left as I came - by Aslan's will." 

The name rang in Chauvelin's bones as though it were sorcery to utter it. Terror gripped him so tightly that it hurt, and he almost staggered: terror of what he could not say, but something utterly unknown, gathering behind him in the shadow the sun cast, gathering before him in the too-dazzling reflections of sun on snow, gathering in the parts of his own mind that he shied from examining. And yet he was not such a coward as all that, and part of him did not merely quail but wondered at it. But as wonder rose in him, it was gone.

"I am afraid I cannot tell you more," Blakeney was saying. "But I will amaze you: I was a boy of not yet twenty when I came to Narnia first, and though I spent ten years here, when I returned to England I swear to you that I lost the decade that I had aged, and must attain twenty once more."

Chauvelin could not find it in himself to believe this, but nor could he summon the spirit to disregard it either. He was still shaken by the name that Blakeney had uttered. 

"And so, if we return..." he managed.

"Yes," Blakeney said lightly, "when this world is done with us - and what purpose it has with us I am most keen to discover - we may return to find a hundred years have passed, like something from an old tale - or none at all." He let Chauvelin absorb this, and added, "I admit I am curious, friend Chauvelin, to see what you make of this place, and it of you; I remember what it made of me."

* * *

As anyone knows who has travelled in such terrain, there is a great difference between being able to see to the bottom of a slope and arriving safely there, and the last part of Chauvelin and Blakeney's descent to the tree line was arduous and uneven. So it was that when Chauvelin paused on a spread of level ground, that might in a kinder season have been a meadow, Blakeney did not comment, but stood at rest and surveyed the scene.

Suddenly he lifted his arm, and Chauvelin followed the direction - of both his pointing finger and his puzzled frown. At the far side of the clearing, the mud had been scuffed about a great deal.

Further investigation revealed the marks of boots, and deeper, narrower imprints, and the suggestion that something had been dragged. Blakeney examined them with great interest, but did not share his findings. The marks did not seem to go higher than the clearing - as though some party had come here, conducted a strange business, and returned the way it had come.

"Let us follow," Blakeney said, having apparently found his adventure.

The way was not easy. Chauvelin had hoped for a moment that the tracks belonged to travellers familiar to the area, whose route would reveal an easier path, but he doubted the other party had had an easier time of their descent than he and Blakeney would, who did not know the way. Nor was it noiseless; even Blakeney could not suppress a huff or grunt from time to time as he dropped from a low shelf, or swung himself across a rocky gap to better footing, or tugged his boots out of the sucking grasp of mud. This did not seem to concern him, and he did not urge Chauvelin to silence.

Noon passed, and they rested briefly, and afternoon lengthened above them. The forest was thick, which narrowed their route to that where branches and bushes were already broken before them; Chauvelin thought of Wenceslas again. Blakeney's suggestion was beginning to look extremely foolish - he had no idea how the travellers they followed were provisioned, and if they were returning to some hamlet or on a longer journey. And beyond the makeshift path that stretched behind them, and the clumsy one their quarry left before them, they were entirely lost.

They came to a narrow gorge, the height of a formidable hill from top to bottom, through which a stream trickled far below. "Wait; let me try it," Blakeney said, and was a full half-hour getting down and up. "Yes," he said, "and from the bottom I think I see it opening out, and fields beyond. This will do." And in a lower tone, "I think we have attracted their attention by now; but they will not surprise us on this bank."

But the appearance of their companions in the woods was, at least to Chauvelin, a surprise.

There were four of them who came silently out of the trees when Blakeney and Chauvelin set a small fire and warmed on it the Centaur's hearty porridge. Even having met a Centaur, Chauvelin started to see them. There was a man with a hunched back, great pointed ears, and thick hair down the back of his neck and the backs of his hands, and yellow eyes, and teeth no man ever grew - a Werewolf, as he soon learned. There was a hunched old woman with long fingers who was no more human than the Werewolf was - that was a Hag. There was a Minotaur, a man with the head of a snarling bull, and there was a Raven, with a wingspan that exceeded Blakeney's height, gliding neatly through the branches as the others gathered.

"Hallo," said Blakeney. "I hoped to find you - what good luck that you have found us."

"Yes," the Hag crooned, chill-voiced, "we wondered at your purpose. If you hunt us, Archenlander, you will not find us to be prey."

"Nothing of the sort," Blakeney said cheerfully, as though he spoke with Werewolves and Minotaurs and Hags every day of the year. "We are lost, and hoped through you to find the road. And for that kind service we are happy to share what we have." He gestured to the fire. "I am Perse, and this my good friend Chambertin -" Chauvelin suppressed the old wince - "and if you would share our fire I am sure we would get on much better in the morning."

"We accept," the Werewolf growled; Blakeney beamed as though he had answered in the friendliest of tones, and for all Chauvelin knew of Werewolves, he had. But he himself could not feel entirely at ease, and he thought that Blakeney, too, was more reserved in the discussion that followed than he had been with Springrush, and he seemed careful to talk of the weather and styles of travel and inconsequential things, and refrain from asking the strange band what they were doing at the border. From which Chauvelin surmised that Blakeney had a good guess of his own, but preferred to wait to see his guess confirmed.

After a modest meal - Chauvelin followed Blakeney's lead in declining the dried meat the Werewolf offered - the two parties slept. Blakeney made a show off offering the others the nearest places to the fire. "You're very kind, young sir," the Hag agreed. "My bones were never young," and Chauvelin, whimsical in a way that was ordinarily alien to him, wondered how close that was to a literal truth. 

Despite all that the Centaur had given them, they were not truly equipped for travel, and Chauvelin spent the kind of night in which he fidgeted with a thousand tiny irritations, sure he would never sleep - until all at once he woke from deep slumber to noises that brought him instantly alert. These were the clash of steel by his ear, and a horrible gurgle; he rolled desperately away, reaching in vain for a weapon of his own as he got to his feet.

"Clumsy," the Werewolf growled from somewhere between Chauvelin and the fire. "Had you not insisted on trying the sword..."

"Treachery," Blakeney cried; he had got to his feet and made a silhouette between Chauvelin and the fire. To Chauvelin's surprise, his voice wavered. "What shall we? Come against me and I'll sell my life dearly; one of you is already dead. Better to flee, Narnian devils!" He was holding a sword; Chauvelin could only assume he had wrested it from the Minotaur as the Minotaur attacked him. Better the Minotaur than Chauvelin, thought the latter, recalling grimly the Scarlet Pimpernel's past deeds.

"Wait," the Hag said, her voice thick and sweet like sugared blood. "You are not such a fool as I thought. Perhaps you may buy your life another way."

"Do not waste time playing with them," the Werewolf snarled.

"I bargain," said the Hag. "We will need a Man in Anvard. We can make use of one."

"The Hag's plan is good," the Raven said from well above them in the branches. "Say which one you want, and the Werewolf and I shall make short work of the other."

"Peace, Raven," the Hag said. "Let Man strike Man; they are a race not slow to murder. Once he has proven to us that he is willing to do what must be done, we will treat with that one that remains."

Chauvelin sneered. "Where 'treat' means 'kill', I suppose," he said. "Easier yet for you to murder the murderer."

The irony of trusting Blakeney at such a pass was not lost on him, and he might have been more uneasy if they had been in a tighter bind. But there was nothing to be gained by cowering, and he thought it quite apparent that Blakeney would have better odds if he, Chauvelin, lived.

Until Blakeney laughed.

It was a laugh so eerie that the hairs rose on Chauvelin's back and up his neck; not loud, but rich and bitter and yet halfway to a sob.

"I could have killed him in Paris," he said, almost indignantly, to the Hag, "or in Nantes -" facing Chauvelin, advancing - "in Boulogne I could have killed him twice!"

Chauvelin stepped back, half wary, half annoyed. He had a keen sense of the absurd, and this dramatic turn seemed entirely feigned to him, but nor could he quite disbelieve it; he could not set aside the years of hatred, and the countless times that that he had thwarted or trapped or tortured his enemy; for years a light word, a mocking laugh, or simply to make a fool of him had been Blakeney's only revenge, and he had never trusted that restraint, as he would never have exercised such restraint himself.

Moreover, he was unarmed, and Blakeney held a sword. 

Chauvelin tried to summon up a part to play, on the chance that this was still Blakeney's ruse. "Coward," he said, with venom. "Will you tell my daughter that you struck me down empty-handed?"

The Hag cackled appreciatively; their enemies were enjoying the sport they had made for themselves, but none of them seemed inclined to arm Chauvelin and even the odds.

With a derisive grunt, Blakeney lifted the sword in both his hands - Chauvelin saw its pommel, round and golden and carved, catch the light - and flung it from him, off to the right into the dark; it had not hit the ground yet when he charged straight at Chauvelin, knocking him off his feet and lifting him up - 

They staggered forward, Chauvelin twisting like an eel, a worm. "Not Boulogne - Orange," Blakeney muttered, and threw him over the edge of the gorge.

* * *

Chauvelin knew better than to moan, though he was hard-pressed to think what to do besides. The voices of the Hag, the Werewolf, the Raven, and the Scarlet Pimpernel carried from the top of the cliff.

"It is well done, son of Adam," the Hag said.

"It is ill done," the Werewolf argued. "Had the Minotaur killed him where he lay, we could have shared his meat - and with you, Raven."

"I do not eat Man's flesh," the Raven retorted. "My kind has a longer memory than yours."

The answer was a snarl, to which Blakeney said, "Peace! Have I satisfied you? Then let there be no further talk. I will keep the sword by me against your treachery..."

But Chauvelin had discovered that he could move, and so move he must; as their voices faded above him, he staggered up. He had landed in a slower-moving part of the stream where the water slid past rushes and mud; the wind had been knocked out of him, but he was whole.

Two small, hard objects dug in to his side by his belt. He discovered that they were the Centaur's compass and vial of star-cordial, wrapped in a rough twist of cloth; Blakeney had been carrying them thus earlier in the day.

 _Orange_ , Blakeney had said - and when he had encountered Chauvelin there, and had Chauvelin entirely at his mercy, both body and soul, Chauvelin remembered well that choosing not to strike had itself been his choice of blow.

Springrush had said that the potion had modest healing properties - and Chauvelin had little else. He uncorked with a shaking hand, and drank.

At once, life filled him: energy, courage, a strange optimism, and immense determination. He was no longer cold. Suddenly he could not merely move, but spring to his feet, possessed of a child's energy and a giant's strength. 

Tucking the compass and vial back into his belt, he sped down along the river, fording it easily when the easy path vanished on this or that side.

* * *

It is curious, the love of the mind of humankind for patterns, and not merely the discovery of them, but the hoarding and keeping of them: habits and addictions, delusions and creeds. One minute after he landed in the river and found that he still lived, Chauvelin believed that Blakeney had passed the compass and vial to him deliberately, by sleight of hand under cover of the dark; and he believed that Blakeney's words to him had been a reassurance that Blakeney did not intend him harm.

By morning, he believed the opposite.

A long, long walk in the dark in starlight, to the dawn and on through the day, had given him many opportunities to reflect, but it would not be true to say his mind was clear. The cordial that he had taken had granted him a kind of euphoria, dizzy and dazzling. Freed suddenly from the pain of impact, and from the ordinary aches of a day of travel, Chauvelin strode with head as high and eyes as bright as Blakeney might. 

He did not dwell on any such similarities as occurred to him.

Rather, with every step he took further down the valley, he thought to himself how it had felt to stand with the dark behind him and Blakeney's lifted sword and mad laughter in front of him; how Blakeney had offered information about the land in which they found themselves in meagre portions, refusing to touch on much that Chauvelin might need to know; how Blakeney had made light of their punishing journey through the snow.

And even the thought of Orange was a goad; because it is no easy thing to be at another's mercy, and very hard to be delivered from despair by an enemy's hand. 

And the further he progressed to Anvard - at the bottom of the valley, he found green, cultivated fields, and soon after that, a road, and he scarcely needed the compass to make his way - the further his mind ranged, to Paris, to Calais, to London - to the attempts he had made to trap the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the sport that Sir Percy had made of them; and both the cruelties he had resorted to, and the foolish positions in which his overreaches had left him, he felt to be full grievances against his enemy, undeserved and unprovoked.

And yet there was a charismatic light in his eye, and his step was buoyant.

As Springrush had said, the cordial was a dubious healer.

* * *

Because of that otherworldly light in him, matters went far easier for him in Anvard than they might have gone. Possessed of nothing but his travel-stained clothes, he first enquired about a position. He found first one and then another - and It might have been luck alone that secured him employment as a guard in Anvard's very castle, though at another time, that would have strained his own belief. For a month, his life, characterised by routine and simplicity, was a kind of dream. It called for little from him but observation and thought.

At all times, his eyes and ears were keenest-bent towards any sign of Blakeney, his erstwhile and present enemy; and he was afforded a clue in the palace's gallery of past and future treasures, where he beheld a sword with a round and golden pommel, locked away.

 

**Part Four: Crossed Swords**

A pair of traits that Chauvelin had cultivated carefully - one of the few, perhaps, that elevated him to the position of an enemy that the Scarlet Pimpernel feared - were insight and intuition. He was a keen observer not just of the man before him but of a room, and although he was careful not to trust to luck over planning, he had over the course of his long career proved bold enough to follow intuition and profit thereby.

He was quite certain that the night of the Scarlet Pimpernel's attempted heist on the Archenland royal treasury grew close.

He did not boast, even to himself, that it was tonight, but several factors influenced his agitation: an irregular schedule of deliveries at the castle; overcast weather and a low moon; the absence of the guard captain, attending King Luneth on a progression to the eastern border; and that two more nights remained in the current guard schedule, and when those two nights had elapsed, a new schedule would be posted that nobody yet knew.

He had kept his information to himself thus far, but had spread his enquiries as widely as he dared. No unusual swords had been forged. The royal guards at the gates had a fraction of the power afforded to their free French counterparts, and so to counter their irritating tensionlessness, Chauvelin had staged the theft of a historic mace belonging to a member of King Luneth's court, and given about the rumour that its intended buyer lay outside the city. Thus the guards were on watch for an item that closely resembled that which had not yet been stolen.

He paced outside the royal gallery, trying to decide whether the Scarlet Pimpernel would come at night or in daylight. Innumerous were the schemes in which Blakeney had tricked him in broad daylight, and he thought the Scarlet Pimpernel had a taste for this - to go quietly and insouciantly during the hours when honest folk were about their business, pretending to be one such - but within the palace, faces were keenly known. None had been hired later than Chauvelin himself. He did not think Blakeney could have arrived ahead of him to take up a cover role among those paid by the alace - even though he had done it before. No, if he had stayed with the gang sent by the Witch, he must have followed slower.

A distinct scraping in the gallery caught his attention, and he caught his breath to think that it would be so simple. So easy. Of course, he had rearranged the guard schedules himself to try to imply a single path towards the goal, but…

Drawing his own sword very, very slowly, he went to the door whose other side lay hidden behind a curtain, and eased himself into the room, while the sounds of Blakeney prying the gallery case open hid his approach.

He heard the hinges squeal, and threw the curtain aside, afraid lest Blakeney would grab the sword and run.

Blakeney looked up at him, and then leapt aside when Chauvelin's sword would have pierced his side.

"My friend," he said softly, stepping to keep the case between them. "You play your part well."

If it was to be goading, then Chauvelin had barbs of his own.

"You must think me very proud," he said quietly, advancing, his eyes flicking between Blakeney's chest and his eyes, watching for the sign of his next movement. "And yet there is some of your English fatalism in me too... If I am to live and die on foreign soil, it would please me just as well if you died before me.... And I thank you for giving me an excuse."

Percy laughed, quick and bitter; he stepped towards one of the sconces, and Chauvelin's blade flicked out to warn him away. He did not relish the mischief Blakeney could wreak with fire or even merely poorer light.

"La, man," he said, "I never said you would die here. I only told you I did not know the moment you should be permitted to return."

"Even so."

In response, Percy ripped one of the smaller curtains from the wall; ordinarily it protected a painting from sunlight. He threw the curtain onto Chauvelin's sword, and Chauvelin was forced to twist and thrust to free himself of it. He feared in that moment that Percy would rush him and, with his greater strength, disarm and pin him, but instead Percy swung back to the gallery case that held the Narnian sword.

Chauvelin was close to the hinge side - he leapt to swing the case closed again and slam it on Blakeney's reaching fingers, but he was too slow. The case thudded dully on the point of the sword as Blakeney withdrew it.

"At least," Chauvelin said coolly, summoning a bravado he did not feel, "I shall not kill an unarmed man." This was a very different situation. His sword was of a good weight and length; it was inflexible and heavy, no fencer's foil, but it did not have nearly the weight and reach of Rhindon in Blakeney's hands. He would merely have to hope that his speed carried the advantage - speed, and sleep, and good meals, and the past month of training; Blakeney was no stranger to the art of the sword, but had had little chance to use it in his humbler escapades.

He did not wince as their blades clashed; the strength behind Blakeney's blade was palpable, and rather than test it so early to the full, Chauvelin twisted aside, in retreat for the moment.

Except for ambition, caution dictated his moves here. If Blakeney escaped the room, Chauvelin would raise the alarm; even if their combat grew too loud, others would come. Chauvelin did not think Blakeney had quite the skill to make a quick and silent end of him and leave without allowing Chauvelin even a final gasp. No; Blakeney must either butcher him with supernatural speed, or disarm and disable him, in order to get away clean.

Caution dictated that Chauvelin should already have called for help and reduced his opponent's options. But he was led on by a slim hope: that he should defeat his opponent, execute him, and then claim to his approaching colleagues that the death had been merely the result of the fight. Witnesses might allow Percy to live. He wanted his enemy's blood, not a distant execution.

Sir Percy's grin gleamed in the torchlight, and Chauvelin thought savagely of splitting that grin with blood.

"We are well matched," Blakeney pronounced, as their blades clashed again. "Imagine if we'd duelled in truth at Boulogne - how differently matters might have fallen..."

Chauvelin was beginning to suspect that his enemy was toying with him.

"Quick," Blakeney said, "I hear footsteps... We have only a little time to set the scene..."

Chauvelin feinted to Blakeney's left, and struck to his right; Blakeney, apparently not at all deceived, beat the strike back so hard that Chauvelin staggered, his sword going wide. He forced his arm up, too slow, too slow...

But instead of killing him where he rocked, Blakeney turned, spun the sword so lightly in his grip that one might have thought it was a circus dagger, took it with both hands, and hurled it, hilt-first, through the high gallery window - so hard that not only did it shatter the window, but took the window's curtain with it.

The moon shone through the blank window, and in the sky above, Chauvelin saw great birds, and understood that they were his confederates and this had always been his plan.

Blakeney dropped almost to a crouch, his smile hidden, but not quickly enough.

And so Chauvelin's superior burst in on him holding a sword to the throat of an unarmed man.

Chauvelin's captain immediately grasped the political import of the stolen sword. Within a handful minutes, a company of men was detached to search the ground, but within another handful, witnesses had reported seeing a group of great birds catch a bundle in the air and bear it westward.

Next, the Narnians were alerted; those Talking Beasts who might follow on paw or hoof or wing, and of course, the royal delegation.

Chauvelin gave his report without taking his sword from Blakeney's neck, and two of his company efficiently clapped irons on Blakeney's ankles and wrists. Then Blakeney was hustled to a part of the jail that Chauvelin had not seen before; his captain was anxious to keep Blakeney, and his theft, away from gossip and speculation. Prince Beland had been roused and was coming to interview him.

Neither censure nor praise had yet been directed at Chauvelin while all this was underway, but there was an unspoken understanding that use should be made of him - both as someone who already grasped the situation, and to avoid spreading the news of the embarrassing theft further than it needed to travel.

Sir Percy, being allowed to sit, stretched out almost comfortably in his cell. His manacles had been attached to a great ring in the cell wall, and a chair had been set out for Prince Beland, well outside the prisoner's reach even to Chauvelin's wary eye.

Chauvelin braced himself for a further taunt, but Blakeney said nothing. To Chauvelin's eye, a faint thread of tension ran through him. And indeed he was securely bound. Chauvelin did not think Sir Blakeney would have come into the castle without some plan to exit it even under these circumstances; should Beland let his guard down, he planned to play the role of the vigilant guard as truly as might be, urging him back.

When Beland entered the room, Blakeney stood, unprompted; with a strange dignity, before the exiled prince could speak, he inclined his head and then slowly, carefully, knelt. It puzzled Chauvelin; there was no mockery here.

Beland thought otherwise. "It would have been better if you had shown the same respect for others' belongings as you show to my person," he said drily. "But let us continue as you have begun. Who are you, and why did you steal my sword?"

"Sire," Blakeney said, again with no appearance of mockery, "I will answer you freely. But I beg of you a more private audience. Send away the guards that accompanied you here."

Beland, to Chauvelin's surprise, raised an eyebrow to him. "How is the prisoner secured?"

"He is chained fast," Chauvelin said. "Show him," he added curtly to Blakeney, suspecting that this would appeal to Blakeney's love of theatre; sure enough, Blakeney stood, as best as he could, and stepped forward to show the paltry range of motion allotted him by his heavy chains.

"Very well," Beland said, to his guards' obvious discomfort, and Chauvelin's confusion: what was it that Blakeney was willing to say in front of him specifically, but not others?

The guards retreated along the corridor to a distance where Beland might summon them back with a cry.

"I thank you," Blakeney said gravely. "To your first question; despite what you have heard, I did not take upon myself the privilege of raising Rhindon in battle. I beg of you, look up."

Above the doorway, behind them, like some strange lintel, the sword Rhindon had been placed. For a moment, Chauvelin wondered if it was a forgery, and then remembered his own researches. It would have to have been made over a year before; and indeed it looked old, but more than that, older. Beland, belying his slight frame, went to it and took it down and ran his hand gently over the carved pommel.

"It is the sword of the Narnian crown," he said. "Why is it there?"

Blakeney shrugged. "I wished you to believe me," he said, "when I said, as I am saying now, that had I chosen to steal your sword from you I could have. But, my liege, that is not and could never be my wish." He bowed again.

"Then answer my second question," Beland said. "Who are you?"

"My liege," Blakeney said, "You know me. I am Percival who fought with your father."

"Sir Percival died with my father," Beland corrected.

"To my great grief," Blakeney said, "I saw him die; but I was spared; and I have had no way of telling my companion then that Sir Percival lived. I have lived only a fraction of the time that you have since then, as I think you guess. I remember you as a boy; and so you must remember me, but I think that you have many, many years on me now. I have not been in Narnia, nor Archenland, nor this entire world, since that time when King Alvian defended the pass against the witch's wrath so that his people might pass."

"I thought you stood with them," Beland repeated.

"I did," Blakeney said, as though he was confessing to something terrible, "until a way opened for me, and your father ordered me through it. I stayed only to see him fall."

Beland did not answer for a long time. Chauvelin saw, on his face, complete and utter belief, but it was tempered by something else - grief perhaps, or was it shame? - that Chauvelin could only guess at.

"You are asking me to trust a ghost."

"I am asking you for so much more than that," said Blakeney, with all of the charisma that Chauvelin had ever seen him summon. "I am asking you to entrust me with a mission that you would not entrust to any other: to follow after the thieves who believe they have stolen your sword - who even now are discovering my deception - in order to yield to them again Rhindon, truly this time, to bring to Jadis, who calls herself Queen in your stead."

"Why?" asked Beland quietly, his emotions now masked behind a keen gaze.

"Let me have the sword a moment," Blakeney said.

"No!" Chauvelin interjected, struggling against the breaking the spell that Blakeney seemed to have laid.

But Beland obeyed, and held it out. A light rippled up the bladed, soft like water, and when their eyes cleared there were words shining upon the blade.

Blakeney looked up at the exiled king.

"All of the gifts claimed by the white witch have poisoned her," he said gently. "I believe this is no different, as it is one for which she greatly yearns."

The blade now read:

When he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

There were tears standing in Beland's eyes.

"And this is to be my miracle," he said.

Blakeney bowed his head. "Hope, and patience," he said, "the first for your people and the second for you. I wish I brought you better news, but I can bring you only memories - and I leave the choice in your hands."

 

**Epilogue**

A third drama played itself out a little ways from Anvard, on a night five past Blakeney's interview with Beland.

A prisoner, by rumour newly escaped, pursued by the palace guard, was set upon by bandits on the road, and lost thereby a treasure before the guard could catch up with him, and when they did, he was laughing at his injuries, and he accepted the cordial that the guard offered him, and after that the story grows muddled; attention was on the loss of the sword.

It is not certain if anyone after saw the attempted thief, or the guard who captured him either.

When Chauvelin stepped back through the first door he saw after that encounter, it was a door to late Spring, and a farmhouse; his enemy had slipped away before him, and it was as quiet there as if he had never been.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear recipient, I loved the chance to write for your prompt, and I really hope some of the enthusiasm comes through in what you read. 
> 
> Thank you to 20thcenturyvole, Bellerophon, aurilly, egelantier, thedevilchicken, Rosencrantz, and NightsMistress for encouragement and ideas.
> 
> My apologies for errors of style and sense that remain.


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